Her Release
by Aiffe
Summary: Take him, break him, wipe the slate clean again. Kanna/Kohaku. Noncon, underage, necrophilia, excessive 'urple. Manga spoilers.


Summary: Take him, break him, wipe the slate clean again. Kanna/Kohaku. Noncon, underage, necrophilia, excessive 'urple. Manga spoilers.

A/N: This started as a request from 4621 Seal for a Kohaku/Kanna lemon. I was originally going to reply that I don't take requests anymore and I don't really write lemons (although there's the occasional tangy lime) but the idea of Kohaku/Kanna just got a hold of me. I haven't posted anything of this pairing since 2004, and that was one of my first fics, so the quality is somewhat questionable. Anyway, I love the pairing, and it's well-worth a revisit.

Hope you like heliotrope.

* * *

The boy's life was an afterthought. When Naraku pulled his corpse from the grave he was long cold, and only the deep chill that beset the castle had saved the boy's body from worse damage. The resurrection was clumsy, clearly designed to be temporary. A jewel shard was inserted into one of the arrow wounds, a little jaki passed through it, and the child gasped for breath that quickly degraded into rough, heaving sobs.

"Get up," Naraku commanded, but Kohaku crumpled to the ground and did not move save to cry. Naraku waited for this to pass, and before his eyes the child's death wounds closed up and healed without a scar, but whatever wounds caused these tears were not so easily found or remedied. Frustration raged within the hanyou lord.

The child was useless. Broken. The jewel could repair the body easily enough, but the mind...

He cried out for his sister, over and over, _Aneue, Aneue._ "Your sister is not coming," Naraku told him, but the tears and the chant went on.

For days he just left the boy to his pain, Kohaku not needing to eat and finding no sleep. His were not the only tormented cries echoing through that castle.

When he finally returned, his decision was clear: get some use from the child, or reclaim the shard. Letting the child return to death seemed almost a mercy, and Naraku did not favor mercy.

He turned to Kanna, standing faithfully at his side. "What do you think of him?" Naraku asked.

"What do I think," Kanna repeated softly, without intonation. Naraku smiled.

"He suffers from his past," Naraku told her.

"Suffers," Kanna repeated, the word strangely alien in her mouth.

"Release him."

"Yes, my master," Kanna answered, and lifted her mirror.

"No, his soul is not for you," Naraku said, putting a hand out to stay her mirror. "Take only that which hinders him from my service."

Kanna put her mirror down, and with even, indifferent motions pulled off her white kimono. Her skin was pale white and translucent, marbled with blue veins. Her body seemed as delicate as blown glass. For a moment she and Kohaku looked at each other, both as if seeing across a great distance. Kanna's hands began working at the knot in Kohaku's belt, and Kohaku's eyes widened as he started to understand.

"No," he said, and put his hands over hers to try to stop her, but Naraku put a hand on his shoulder, big and heavy and menacing even in so innocuous a gesture.

"Let her," Naraku said. "Let her take the pain away."

Kohaku gulped, and his hands relaxed on Kanna's slightly, letting them do their work. "Take the pain...?"

"Yes," Kanna said in her hollow little voice. "Drown the pain in the void." She finished undoing his clothes and he lay bare before her, all gangly and lean, what little muscle he had well-toned, his skin kissed by a forgotten sun. She placed her hand gently on his stomach and held it there for what would have been the span of several heartbeats, had they a pulse to spare between them.

"Who are you?" Kohaku asked, his voice dropped in both volume and tone.

"Kanna," the girl replied, the three syllables of her name distinct in the methodical way she said it. "Nothingness."

Kohaku frowned as her hand began to wander, and let out a sudden gasp when it found what he considered to be a private area. He started to struggle, but Naraku slammed him hard into the floor with a hand on each shoulder, sending a shock through his shard. He continued to squirm feebly, and Naraku stroked his hair.

It wasn't just the touching. By then Kohaku felt disassociated enough from his body he probably could have laid there in apathy and let Naraku himself violate him. But somehow Kanna got into his head, touched his very soul, and it was this that filled him with fear, this that drew whimpers and weak resistance from the already-broken boy, even as his body couldn't help but respond to her caress.

"No, Kanna," he pleaded. "No, _please_." His eyes shot wide open in terror as she mounted him, and he had another fit of struggling, thrashing about any way he could trying to get away from her.

Naraku held him and stroked his hair soothingly. "Shh, it'll all be over soon," Naraku told him, although no one could have mistaken those honey-sweet words for actual kindness.

Kohaku threw his head back in his convulsions, his eyes rolling up into his head. "Oh gods, someone help me," he prayed. "_Aneue._"

"_Aneue_," Kanna echoed, a brief gleam in her tar-black eyes. Shadows spilled out from her loins, entwining with their bodies. Kohaku looked down and saw this and quickly looked away, seeming about ready to pass out from shock. He'd gone pale and was drenched in sweat, although Kanna had not sweated so much as a drop.

"Who is your Aneue?" Naraku asked.

"I...I don't know," Kohaku said, clearly confused. "I...she has to help me." His brow furrowed. "Have I done something? Is she coming?"

"What does she look like?"

Kohaku took a series of short, frightened breaths. "I...I can't—no! Let me go!" He bucked up, only serving to drive himself further into Kanna, and this time Naraku barely had to restrain him. His hands again caressed Kohaku's hair and brow, even once brushing his lips almost tenderly. Kohaku moaned in what sounded like pleasure, and fell to babbling, "No, please no, please."

He came squeezing his eyes shut against the tears. Even Kanna parted her lips for a long, contented sigh.

"Are you in any pain, boy?" Naraku asked.

Kohaku stretched his limbs, considering. He looked curiously at the young girl still astride him, and felt nothing. There was a vague sense of relief, as though he had been crushed by a great burden and finally set it down, although he could not remember what this burden may have been. "No."

"No, _master_."

"No, Master," Kohaku repeated blithely.

Kanna lifted herself off him, impassive as ever. "He is yours," she said to Naraku.

"Really," Naraku purred. "Let's test that, shall we? I want to see my little marionette kill."

* * *

After that first time, no force was needed to bring Kohaku into Kanna's embrace. He came to her willingly, needfully, his hands stained with blood and his eyes with tears, although he could not remember why exactly he cried. He sought her out, knelt before her, and begged to be released from his pain.

Kanna took him within herself, neither gentle nor cruel, washing over him as inexorably as the sea smooths out the sand.

And so time passed, and passed, and was forgotten again.

* * *

"It's a lie," Kohaku said at last, after more days or weeks or months than he could count. "My life has been a lie that you made for me."

"Not a lie," Kanna said, her voice matter-of-fact, not reflecting the weight of his accusations. "A blank slate. It cannot lie, because it says nothing, nothing at all."

"And how is that not a lie?" Kohaku demanded. "I am not nothing! My past is not nothing! I do not feel _nothing_! I am real, and my past is real, and my feelings..." he trailed off.

"I have seen your heart," Kanna said, and put a hand on his chest. Kohaku flinched. She looked at him searchingly. "What is there that would not long for oblivion? What of your pain?"

"My pain," Kohaku said slowly, "and my ability to feel pain, my _conscience—_are necessary!"

"Why?" Kanna asked. She pressed closer to him, placed her lips over his, and Kohaku was reminded of fresh snowfall, obscuring and muffling everything. He could feel the passion being drained from him, and with it, a lull in the pain. For a moment, he was sure he would give in.

With a sudden determination, Kohaku kissed her back fiercely, calling up everything from within himself, all his ferocity and regret and hatred and love. More, he hoped, than Kanna could take from him at once. "This is why," he said, his lips to her ear. "Our connection must work both ways. If you can make me feel nothing, then I can make you feel _something_." He stroked her cheek, almost lovingly. "Feel this, Kanna."

Something fleeting crossed Kanna's face—a frown?—before it evened itself out again. "You would be happier if you chose to forget," she told him.

"No, you make me forget happiness and sorrow alike. You make me forget life itself."

"But, Kohaku," Kanna said. "We are not alive."

"Ah, well," Kohaku replied. "Some things you don't forget."

Her robe was already half-off, and he pushed it off her shoulders. "This must be another of Naraku's cruel ironies," he said. "Something that most people do to feel, we do not to feel. Something most people do to make life, we do in death, or un-life. Something that most people do out of love...do you want to feel love, Kanna? Shall I show you?" His hands roamed her body, a little bit forcefully but not hard enough to hurt, and Kanna actually shivered.

"I'm afraid," Kanna whispered.

"Do you not want me, Kanna? After all the times you took me?"

"_Want_," Kanna repeated, a hunger growing in her eyes. "I have always wanted for something."

Kohaku smiled. "Then you shall have." As before, he could feel her presence in his mind, but now he did not feel weak or defenseless. He met her with his own essence, calling to the fore all his love, his affection, and his tenderness.

Despite the scores or hundreds of times she had made him forget this way, Kohaku found himself uncertain with her body, fearing that the thing he tried to show her—life perhaps, or love, or passion?—was long lost to him as well. Still, there was satisfaction in the way she trembled and sighed under his touches, the way her eyes opened wide as he showed her everything, all his past, his love, his pain, everything that she had tried to take from him.

When they finished, Kanna did not speak. She lay curled in on herself, her hands tight and shaking against her chest.

"Have I hurt you?" Kohaku asked, and the concern was genuine, despite the ways in which she had done him wrong. Guilt twinged at him. If the girl had truly never felt anything before, the mess of his feelings were not the most ideal place to start.

Kanna did not answer him, and Kohaku stroked her cheek. "Sorry," he told her. "Although if you cannot serve your master now, perhaps this is best. I'm glad I don't have to kill you." As he pulled his hand back, Kanna grabbed his wrist, her grip like iron. Her impossibly black eyes flicked up towards him, looking into him. He understood, or thought he did.

"It was a mercy you didn't see fit to grant me," he said, his words very cold, a coldness he had learned here in Naraku's castle.

* * *

"Show him to me," Naraku said.

Kanna knelt before him, hands on the edges of the mirror in her lap, and shook her head. A petal from one of the white flowers in her hair fell to the floor, wilted. Naraku frowned at this.

"Is something on your mind?" he demanded.

Kanna's stare was perfectly blank. "Nothing."

"You're hiding something."

"I am incapable of lying."

"_Were_ incapable. No, I think there is..." he looked at her sidelong. "My fault, I suppose. I must have made you weak. First that girl cracks your mirror, and now this." With words like these, Naraku would destroy that which failed to please him. Facing what could well be her death, Kanna was stonily calm. "Are you protecting him?" he demanded. "He left you here, you know. Left you to suffer without hope."

Kanna stared straight ahead, seeking neither life nor death from Naraku. She did not think of those weeks (or days, or months) when she lay where Kohaku had left her, waiting for the pain to subside and realizing that it never would, because the pain was real and she was not. She lay there until Naraku remembered her existence, such as it was, and called her name. She came to him, ready to serve, silent, willing, but not empty.

* * *

Kagome cried.

There was nothing she could do but cry, perhaps all the more so because it had been the only thing Kanna could not do. Naraku's weakness, his greatest fear, spilled out before her: that one indelible point of purity within the Shikon no Tama.

_But why?_ Kagome asked. _Why die to help us?_

_Of all the things I was never meant to feel, I think I hate love the most_, Kanna replied.

Kagome cried, and her tears were shards of glass.


End file.
